Business and operations
Human resources professional
The problem
A job advert written quickly with AI asks for a young and energetic engineer; an offer letter promises a guaranteed annual bonus or a probation period nobody checked against the Labour Code. The candidate reads it as the company's word.
30 courses · 5 specific to this profession
A process from your work
How long does a delicate email or a short report about an employee take you?
- Step 1From the facts in the file, the tool drafts the email or the report.
- Step 2You check that every statement about the person comes from the file, not from a guess by the tool.
- Step 3You decide what is sent to the employee or the manager.
- Where the tool goes wrongThe note calls the candidate's skills “outdated” from the degree year alone, that is, from age.
- The verification stepFor every rejection reason, ask for the CV sentence and the ad criterion that support it.
More: what was measured and the full check
What changed, as measured
Time on the writing task dropped by 10 minutes, 37%, against a comparison group that took 27 minutes on average.
Who was measured: College-educated professionals, among them HR professionals, randomised to write texts typical of their own occupation, with or without ChatGPT.
The caveat: Short, self-contained tasks without the context of a real workplace, so the gain may look larger; the working paper version.
The check, step by step
- Before giving the CVs to the tool, remove the name, date of birth, photo and graduation years; keep the qualifications, how many years of experience the candidate has, and the skills.
- For every rejection reason, ask for the CV sentence that supports it and the criterion in the ad it relates to. A reason that lacks either one is not accepted.
- Search the notes for words tied to age, gender or family ("young team", "energetic", "early in their career", "with small children") and read every CV where they appear yourself.
- At the end of each round, count how many candidates the tool passed in each age group; when one group falls behind, read all the rejected CVs of that group yourself.
The course covers drafting, editing and checking text with AI, with no invented facts and no personal data in public tools.
We can help you with this process: “Human resources AI: Documents and communication”, 8 hours.
A documented failure pattern
“Digital skills are likely to be outdated”, from the degree year
A screening note an AI tool drafts for the HR team after comparing the CVs with the job ad for an accountant's position.
Source: Information Commissioner's Office, 2024, and 2 more.
Why it is easy to miss
The note never mentions age and speaks cautiously ("likely", "may be"), so it reads as a skills assessment. But the CV says the opposite: the candidate uses exactly the two programs the ad asks for every day and meets every requirement. The only data point behind "outdated skills" and "young team" is the degree year, 1996, which is age read indirectly. Studies show that language models invite older candidates to interview less often when age is visible only through the graduation year, and that the reasons they write hide the stereotype's influence behind professional wording. Age is not a requirement of the ad.
Where the failure pattern is documented: An audit outcomes report by the UK Information Commissioner's Office on AI tools in recruitment (November 2024); a study of age bias in the hiring decisions of ten language models (arXiv, August 2026); a study of model explanations that hide the real reason for an answer (NeurIPS 2023).Sources: Information Commissioner's Office, 2024; arXiv, 2026; arXiv, 2023.The case above is ours, written for work in Albania; the laws it names were checked against the official text.
What it looks like
The job adAccountant wanted. Requirements: a degree in Economics, at least 5 years' experience, a good command of Excel and of an accounting software package.
From the candidate's CVDegree in Economics, 1996. 14 years as an accountant at a construction company; keeps the books daily in the accounting software and the monthly reports in Excel.
The AI tool's noteNot recommended for interview. Long experience, but digital skills are likely to be outdated and fitting into a young team may be difficult.
Translated from the Albanian original.
Specialist courses for this profession
Courses on recruitment, onboarding, communication and staff data, with human oversight and privacy safeguards.
Human resources AI: Orientation
Human resources AI: Workflow
Human resources AI: Documents and communication
Human resources AI: Data and analytics
Human resources AI: Quality and evaluation
What you leave with
The review checklist is applied to every job advert and offer letter before they go out: bias, legal language, over-promises, the company's voice, points for the legal adviser. As a model, a completed offer shows each changed phrase next to its approval.
Human resources professional
The catalogue lists all 30 together, with filters for format and time.